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#Voice
Oct 28Wed
  1. NVIDIA Newsroom58

    NVIDIA RTX Spark Windows Laptops Gain New Models, Agent Tools and Games

    NVIDIA announced RTX Spark laptops from ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft and MSI, combining a Blackwell RTX GPU and Grace CPU with up to 128GB unified memory and up to 1 petaflop of FP4 AI performance, starting at $2,599. Updates include the open-weight Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe speech model, Liquid AI's LFM3 family with day-zero support, and resource management controls in NVIDIA App for sharing GPU resources between foreground apps and background agents. Phantom Blade Zero launches Oct. 28 with ray tracing and DLSS 4.5, and RTX Remix 1.6 brings path tracing and DLSS to Minecraft Java Edition 1.21.1.

  2. ElevenLabs Blog32

    Voice AI for Karnataka

    At the first ElevenLabs Summit India in Bengaluru, ElevenLabs signed an MoU with the Government of Karnataka to bring voice AI into state public services, covering exploration of pilots for grievance redressals, public helplines and entitlement schemes in Kannada and 13 other official Indian languages. The agreement also includes deploying ElevenLabs' safety framework—covering deepfake detection, watermarking, consent, limits on voice cloning and fraud prevention—and supporting residents who have lost the ability to speak through free lifetime licences under the One Million Voices program.

  3. ElevenLabs Blog24

    Lettuce cuts creative ad production from over a week to under a minute with ElevenLabs

    Lettuce's growth team uses Ads Engine in ElevenCreative to pull its best-performing Meta ads, generate new versions in about 45 seconds, and push them back to market, with the creative director and a performance marketer reviewing each ad before it runs. The company reports roughly 75% lower creative costs and 40% to 60% lower cost per lead compared with other creative running in similar periods, and its current top-performing Meta ad came from the 15th to 20th iteration of an original asset.

  4. ElevenLabs Blog58

    ElevenLabs and adELA bring free voice restoration to Spain

    ElevenLabs announced a partnership with adELA, Spain's leading ALS association, to give people living with ALS across Spain free access to its voice restoration and preservation technology, the first Spanish initiative under the ElevenLabs Impact Program and the first country where the technology is available through a national patient association. Eligible people diagnosed with ALS can create a digital version of their voice by recording new samples if their speech hasn't yet changed significantly, or by uploading old recordings if it already has. The article profiles Aníbal Martín, an aviation engineer and programming teacher with ALS who used the technology to create a digital version of his voice, saying "Being able to hear my own voice means being able to remain myself."

  5. Hacker News AI38

    Tenstorrent and Smallest.ai Partner to Bring Production-Grade Voice AI On-Prem

    Tenstorrent and Smallest.ai have partnered to deliver an on-prem voice AI stack that runs Smallest.ai's Lightning V2 real-time text-to-speech model natively on Tenstorrent Galaxy Blackhole servers, aiming to reduce deployment costs while meeting real-time performance needs. Smallest.ai said working with Tenstorrent's NoC and larger SRAM unlocked 4x gains at a fraction of the cost of comparable GPU infrastructure, and the joint solution targets high-volume, data-sensitive use cases in financial services, telecom, healthcare, and enterprise. Lightning V2 is available on Tenstorrent hardware today with usage-based pricing and no upfront commitments.

  6. Hacker News AI22

    Show HN: KI Song erstellen – German AI music from prompts and lyrics

    KlangKI is a German-optimized AI song generator that turns a description or user-supplied lyrics into a complete song with vocals, or into instrumental tracks, with style and voice selectable. The site says generation typically takes about 3–5 minutes, results can be downloaded as MP3 or shared via public link, and users receive full rights for commercial use with no ongoing license fees. It also offers an AI lyrics generator and lists use cases such as social media, video, games, podcasts and marketing.

  7. Hacker News AI58

    AI Phone

    AI Phone is an AGPL-3.0 open-source agent that runs on a computer and handles phone calls over SIP, currently requiring macOS on Apple Silicon with 16 GB RAM recommended for the default 4B model. Setup via a git clone and install script configures call direction, model, line and voice, and the daemon supports outgoing calls with an AI disclosure plus incoming calls using a set greeting. Speech recognition and synthesis stay local, while the language model can be local MLX, a Claude Code or Codex subscription, or an OpenAI-compatible endpoint.

  8. ElevenLabs Blog38

    How to build an AI voice assistant: Brand-aligned voice AI

    This guide explains how to build an AI voice assistant by connecting speech to text, an LLM, and text to speech into one real-time pipeline, then adding a knowledge base, business tools, system instructions, and fallback rules. It covers architecture choices between raw APIs and the managed ElevenAgents platform, latency targets below 500 ms with voice activity detection, caller verification, human handoff, brand voice customization, and pre-launch testing for latency, interruptions, accuracy, and safety. Post-launch metrics such as containment, escalation rate, word error rate, hallucination rate, and CSAT are recommended for continued improvement.

  10. ElevenLabs Blog22

    What shoppers choose once they’ve tried a retail AI agent

    ElevenLabs ran three studies across the UK, US, Canada, Australia, Europe, South Africa and Latin America in which most shoppers completed a real task with a live voice agent before answering questions. Nearly half chose speaking and hearing replies going forward, and voice was the top choice on all six shopping tasks, though comparing products split shoppers almost evenly; when told an agent had failed once, the share asking for a person rose from 24% for a late delivery to 61% for a wrong charge. Shoppers wanted a written record of resolutions, and 60% said they would abandon an agent entirely if there were no visible way to reach a person.

Oct 27Tue
  1. ElevenLabs Blog50

    Why voice wins for complex, stressful conversations

    ElevenLabs compared voice calls and chat across hundreds of production agents and found that in conversations longer than two minutes, voice succeeded 32% more often than text chat and resolved successful long conversations about one third quicker. In a simulated canceled-flight scenario, 85% of 98 participants preferred voice, citing speed of resolution and empathy. A 16% reduction in average end-to-end latency across 315 agent conversations correlated with a 26% lift in success rate, with calls ending within 15 seconds falling from 21.1% to 3.8%.

  2. ElevenLabs Blog38

    When AI comes knocking, how governments can prepare

    ElevenLabs describes "agentic flooding"—an AI-driven rise in the volume or complexity of requests to public services—citing researchers who tracked 84 cases across 11 countries, and says it released synthetic voice detection in ElevenAgents to tell whether a caller is human or AI and set handling rules. It argues governments should add capacity rather than friction, citing Midland, Texas's AI civic concierge Jacky and Czech benefits and employment hotlines where agents handle roughly 5,000 calls per day and resolve about 85% independently.

  3. Ars Technica · AI58

    Apple releases iOS and macOS 27.2 with new Siri AI features, new Music logo

    Apple released the 27.2 updates across iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS, with iOS 27.2 adding a Siri memory feature that recalls past conversations, expanded data sources including voicemails and Messages attachments, an "Excluded Apps" option, and Siri AI support in French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish. Other additions include context-aware suggestions in Messages, SynthID watermarking in Photos, Apple TV app user profiles, new Apple Music branding, and Apple Pencil support on the iPhone Duo foldable. macOS Golden Gate 27.2, watchOS, and visionOS 27.2 share the Siri updates, and macOS 27.2 beta references to gesture recognition in Photos, Notes, and Safari may relate to unconfirmed reports of touch support on the next MacBook Pro.

  4. Apple Newsroom48

    Siri AI is available in more languages starting today

    Apple Intelligence with Siri is available when the device and Siri language are set to Chinese (simplified or traditional), Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, or Vietnamese. Siri AI is in beta in iOS 27.2, iPadOS 27.2, macOS 27.2, watchOS 27.2, and visionOS 27.2, requires an Apple Intelligence-enabled device set to a supported language, and is currently unavailable in the EU on iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS. Some server-based Apple Intelligence features are subject to daily usage limits, with expanded access to be offered for a fee in the future.

  5. PyTorch Blog34

    Optimizing Streaming Speech Recognition on Arm® Edge Devices with ExecuTorch

    This PyTorch blog case study takes the multilingual Nemotron 3.5 streaming ASR model from PyTorch to ExecuTorch and profiles it on a Google Pixel 11, measuring how chunk size and precision affect streaming WER and processing time. Enabling Arm SME2 cut whole-recording processing time from 9.79 to 4.61 seconds for FP16 (2.12x) and from 5.20 to 3.24 seconds for QC8W (1.61x), with GEMM driving most of the gain, while longer chunks improved accuracy at the cost of latency. ETDump and Arm Streamline were combined to attribute speedups to operators and confirm which KleidiAI SME2 microkernels actually ran.

Oct 25Sun
  1. TechCrunch · AI65

    Block’s new voice model sounds eerily human

    Block released Dessa, a full-duplex speech-to-speech model trained entirely on human speech that runs locally on a single NVIDIA GPU or consumer hardware such as a MacBook M4 Max. The company says emotion is built into the model rather than driven by text or voice tags, and it has called for safety researchers to test Dessa, which is not publicly available.

Oct 24Sat
  1. The Decoder58

    Block's new AI model Dessa was trained entirely on human speech to catch emotions text-based models miss

    Block, the company behind Square and Cash App, has unveiled Dessa, an AI speech model it says is the first trained entirely on human speech with no text data, built from scratch. Dessa processes speech directly as audio rather than converting it to text first, letting it pick up on emotions, sarcasm, laughter and pauses in real time, and it supports full-duplex communication so it can listen and talk at the same time. It runs locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max, was trained on a single NVIDIA GB200 NVL72, and is not yet publicly available, with the team first seeking AI security researchers to test it for unexpected risks.

  2. The Verge · AI58

    Jack Dorsey’s Block made an AI model that talks to you like an awkward new friend

    Block announced Dessa, an AI model trained "from scratch on nothing but human conversation," and shared sample chats that can be awkward and uncanny, including one where it mistakes the speaker for someone named "Ronaldo." The team describes Dessa as a "true speech-to-speech model" that can run locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max "or better," citing curiosity, better understanding between humans and AI, and safety as reasons for building it. Block says it will give "a small group of AI safety researchers" early access to the model.

Oct 23Fri
  1. TechCrunch · AI40

    Nirva raises $33M for a pendant that only listens to you

    Nirva, founded in 2025 by former Meta Reality Labs employees Wei Lyu and Jason Chen along with Hanying Hu, announced a $25 million pre-Series A round on top of $8 million raised earlier this year from investors including Lightspeed and South Park Commons, bringing its total to $33 million. Its first device is an approximately eight-gram pendant, also wearable as a bracelet, with up to three days of battery life, that passively listens only to the wearer by filtering out other people's speech and by default keeps no audio or transcripts after processing. The $249 device, offered in silver, brushed silver, black, and gold, will begin taking orders in November with an aim to ship to early users by the end of the year.

  2. AWS Machine Learning Blog43

    Amazon Polly delivers a major upgrade to its Generative engine

    Amazon Polly's upgraded Generative engine is now generally available, offering more expressive and accurate speech with low latency as a drop-in upgrade that requires no code changes. It adds 14 new voices across 9 locales, including the first generally available Generative voices for Hindi and Finnish, bringing the catalog to 57 voices across 11 languages and 25 locales, with expansion to AWS GovCloud (US-West). Pricing is unchanged, and the engine continues to support SSML and the Bi-Di Streaming API.

  3. AWS Machine Learning Blog38

    Stream low-latency speech from AI agents using Kokoro TTS on Amazon SageMaker AI

    This AWS post describes streaming each sentence an agent produces to a hosted Kokoro-82M text-to-speech model on a SageMaker AI real-time endpoint, so synthesis starts on the first sentence instead of waiting for the full response. It covers bidirectional WebSocket handling, an incremental sentence chunker, and two transports for returning audio to the browser, reporting that incremental sending cut mean time to first audio byte from 329.3 ms to 156.7 ms in isolation and made bidi mode 2.4 to 3.5 times faster than batch in a deployed agent.

  4. AWS Machine Learning Blog32

    Stop guessing auto scaling targets for TTS on Amazon SageMaker AI

    This AWS post deploys Kokoro-82M, an 82-million-parameter non-autoregressive TTS model, as a custom container on an Amazon SageMaker AI real-time endpoint via AWS CDK stacks, then replaces a guessed auto scaling target with values derived from two live measurements: Q_max (the highest per-instance concurrency that still meets a 3,000 ms p95 time-to-first-audio SLO, measured at 50) and T_total (end-to-end scale-out time, measured at 260.2 s and planned against 320.2 s). Scaling uses the native ConcurrentRequestsPerModel metric, and a five-command tool chain (drift, qmax, ttotal, plan, validate) computes the scale-out threshold (37.5), scale-in threshold (25.0) and asymmetric cooldowns by arithmetic. The authors note the methodology generalizes to other latency-sensitive, concurrency-bound real-time SageMaker AI endpoints, while the specific numbers hold only for Kokoro-82M on ml.g5.xlarge.

Oct 21Wed
  1. Hugging Face Blog58

    Granite Speech 5.0: Transcribe, Translate, and Attribute more Accurately and Faster

    IBM released granite-speech-5.0-2b, a new speech-language model trained on 390,000 hours of public audio that transcribes English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese, translates to and from English in those languages plus English to Italian and Mandarin, and supports language-ID prompting and keyword lists up to 2,000 terms. It also updated granite-speech-5.0-470m-turboctc, which adds multilingual transcription and native punctuation and capitalization and reaches 19,870 RTFx on the Open ASR Leaderboard (about 1.6x faster than at launch), and granite-speech-4.1-2b-plus, which cuts word diarization error rate and speaker-attributed WER by 7% each and long-form WER by 24%. All three ship under Apache 2.0 with support in Transformers, vLLM, llama.cpp, and mlx-audio.

Oct 20Tue
  1. Mistral AI80

    Voxtral 3

    Mistral introduces Voxtral 3, a family of speech-to-text and text-to-speech models plus a LiveKit-based voice agent SDK that combines listening, reasoning, tool calling and speaking in one real-time streaming pipeline. It includes Voxtral Small Transcribe 3 for multilingual transcription with diarization and context biasing, Voxtral Mini TTS 3 for expressive speech in 35+ languages and 50+ dialects, and Pro Voice adaptation from 30 minutes of audio. It is available via Mistral's EU-hosted API or self-deployment, with pricing from $0.0035/min for batch transcription to $13 per 1M characters for TTS.

    Why it matters: The announcement details concrete model capabilities, benchmarks and pricing for teams evaluating real-time voice agents and sovereign speech deployment.